Public support for and interest in various fields, issues, organizations, and situations change. Public support for and interest in science and science education have been studied over a thirty-year period. Yankelovich's work related to science was enlarged to include science education. The public was very supportive of science and science education following the 1957 lauching of the Soviet Sputnik This high level of support is observed again in 1985, presumably because of the relationship of science and technology to economic security. (...) Public support for science and science education was at a low point for the 30 year period in 1975. (shrink)

Public support for and interest in various fields, issues, organizations, and situations change. Public support for and interest in science and science education have been studied over a thirty-year period. Yankelovich's work related to science was enlarged to include science education. The public was very supportive of science and science education following the 1957 lauching of the Soviet Sputnik This high level of support is observed again in 1985, presumably because of the relationship of science and technology to economic security. (...) Public support for science and science education was at a low point for the 30 year period in 1975. (shrink)

van der Velde & de Kamps argue for the importance of considering the binding problem in accounts of human mental representation. However, their proposed solution fails as a complete account because it represents the bindings between roles and their fillers through associations (or connections). In addition, many criticisms leveled by the authors towards synchrony-based bindings models do not hold.

The popular belief that religion is the same everywhere or that all religions are ‘at bottom’ identical in essentials is a widespread falsehood that is saved from being completely worthless by the fact that religion does exhibit a universal or common structure wherever it appears. This structure is intimately related to the structure of human life in the world. The enduring pattern that enables us to understand religions widely separated in both time and space depends largely on the fact that (...) man and the process of human life in the world have their own structures which remain, despite the undeniable variety introduced by vast differences of culture, ethnic features, geographical location, climate etc. Structure means pattern or form; it is reality significantly organised. It can be grasped as that which endures above and beyond changing historical details. Because human life has a structure, we are able to understand the wrath of Achilles or sympathise with the love of Abélard for Héloïse although we are separated from both by centuries of time. (shrink)

Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical (...) treatment of religious concerns. (shrink)

_A new theory of how and why we cooperate, drawing from economics, political theory, and philosophy to challenge the conventional wisdom of game theory_ Game theory explains competitive behavior by working from the premise that people are self-interested. People don’t just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for cooperation leave much to be desired. Unlike competing players, cooperating players take those actions that they would like others to take—which Roemer (...) calls “Kantian optimization.” Through rigorous reasoning and modeling, Roemer demonstrates a simpler theory of cooperative behavior than the standard model provides. (shrink)

This review of Martin Jay’s recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth-construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of (...) paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth-telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process. (shrink)

Suppose that a school restricts student expression critical of homosexual conduct yet allows or actively supports student expression that promotes acceptance and tolerance of gays and lesbians. Can such a policy be justified if the anti-gay speech disrupts the educational environment of the school while the pro-gay speech does not? Or does the differential treatment of anti-gay and pro-gay speech constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination because it distorts the marketplace of ideas within the school? Can viewpoint discrimination ever be justified on (...) the ground that anti-gay speech invades the rights of others under Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969)? These were among the questions debated by Judges Reinhardt and Kozinski in the Ninth Circuit's now-vacated panel opinion in Harper v. Poway Unified School District, 445 F.3d 1166 (9th Cir. 2006), but their significance to the law of student speech is quite general. Courts are increasingly becoming concerned with the question of whether Tinker allows viewpoint-based restrictions of student speech, but so far jurists have not reached agreement on this question or even on the simpler question of what counts as viewpoint discrimination. This article attempts to clarify the emerging debate about the permissibility of viewpoint discrimination under Tinker and proposes modifications to the Tinker framework that would enable courts to deal more fruitfully with charges that school officials have imposed viewpoint-based restrictions on student speech. I argue that we should think of viewpoint discrimination as purposeful restriction of expression on the basis of governmental disagreement with the message. Tinker must be understood to bar purposeful viewpoint discrimination, but the conclusion that a school speech restriction constitutes purposeful viewpoint discrimination will come at the end rather than at the beginning of constitutional analysis. A school will never announce that it has restricted student speech on the basis of disagreement with the message; instead, it will claim that it has regulated speech to prevent harm. And this is something that schools (and the state more generally) may sometimes do - at least with sufficient justification. Tinker obviously contemplates the regulation of speech where necessary to prevent two specific sorts of harms - disruption to the school's mission and violations of the rights of other students - and so must require courts to distinguish between school speech restrictions based on impermissible ideological purposes and those based on the permissible purposes of preventing disruptions or violations of student rights. Tinker's substantial disruption test, I contend, should primarily be understood as a mechanism for helping courts to smoke out these impermissible purposes. (shrink)

This book presents a detailed fieldwork-based study of the ancient Indian religion of Jainism. Drawing on field research in northern Gujarat and on the study of both ancient Sanskrit and Prakrit and modern vernacular Jain religious literature, John Cort provides a rounded portrait of the religion as it is practiced today.

This essay seeks to link management action with business ethics. It utilizes two conceptual models of decision making to examine the important processes of information gathering and information processing. This analysis is then related to the ethical aspects of a business decision to help explain differences in the selection of ethical criteria.

Examines Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788-1860) conception of human agency and responsibility, his unique ethics of the morally virtuous character, and his assessment of life as fundamentally suffering. This title focuses on his contention that the human will and the human body cannot have a cause and effect relationship with each other.

Utilitarians, maximinners, prioritarians, and sufficientarians each provide examples of situations demonstrating, often apparently compellingly, that a sensible ethical observer must adopt their view and reject the others. I argue, to the contrary, that an attractive ethic is eclectic or pluralistic, in the sense of coinciding with these apparently different views in different regions of the space of social states. I reject the view that an appealing ethic can be universally maximin, prioritarian, or utilitarian. Key Words: distributive justice • utilitarianism • (...) maximin • sufficiency • priority. (shrink)

This article summarizes a variety of current as well as previous research in support of a new theory of consciousness. Evidence has been steadily accumulating that information about a stimulus complex is distributed to many neuronal populations dispersed throughout the brain and is represented by the departure from randomness of the temporal pattern of neural discharges within these large ensembles. Zero phase lag synchronization occurs between discharges of neurons in different brain regions and is enhanced by presentation of stimuli. This (...) evidence further suggests that spatiotemporal patterns of coherence, which have been identified by spatial principal component analysis, may encode a multidimensional representation of a present or past event. How such distributed information is integrated into a holistic percept constitutes the binding problem. How a percept defined by a spatial distribution of nonrandomness can be subjectively experienced constitutes the problem of consciousness. Explanations based on a discrete connectionistic network cannot be reconciled with the relevant facts. Evidence is presented herein of invariant features of brain electrical activity found to change reversibly with loss and return of consciousness in a study of 176 patients anesthetized during surgical procedures. A review of relevant research areas, as well as the anesthesia data, leads to a postulation that consciousness is a property of quantumlike processes, within a brain field resonating within a core of structures, which may be the neural substrate of consciousness. This core includes regions of the prefrontal cortex, the frontal cortex, the pre- and paracentral cortex, thalamus, limbic system, and basal ganglia. (shrink)

As a work of a scholarship it seems to me to compare favourably with the best books on the subject, including those by Marcus Singer and Onora Nell.' Prof.

In the first comprehensive biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, John E. Joseph restores the full character and history of a man who is considered the founder of modern linguistics and whose ideas have influenced literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and virtually every other branch of humanities and the social sciences.

This article explores the rhetoric, and mass mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres, author/animators and modes. Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial ‘praise or blame’ speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose (...) and evoke common values, in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities, in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence in analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ‘shuttling’ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future ‘places upon one’s conscience’. (shrink)

Is morality too difficult for human beings? Kant said that it was, except with God's assistance. Contemporary moral philosophers have usually discussed the question without reference to Christian doctrine, and have either diminished the moral demand, exaggerated human moral capacity, or tried to find a substitute in nature for God's assistance. This book looks at these philosophers--from Kant and Kierkegaard to Swinburne, Russell, and R.M. Hare--and the alternative in Christianity.

A mutual relation between God and the world provides a crucial distinction between panentheism and both classical theism and pantheism. Several proposals responding to Analytical Theology's challenge to distinguish panentheism from other forms of theism are considered and found inadequate. After defining mutual relation, conceptual evidence and the frequency of descriptions of panentheism that affirm a mutual relation between God and the world provide evidence that a mutual relation is crucial to distinguishing panentheism. Finally, benefits of recognizing a mutual relation (...) between God and the world as crucial to panentheism are described. (shrink)